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Immigration Minister Jason Kenney’s office apologized Thursday to Sun News Network after bureaucrats in his department stood in as fake “new Canadians” for a citizenship reaffirmation ceremony the network broadcast last October.

“We were surprised Thursday to learn that some of the people participating in the citizenship affirmation ceremony broadcast on October 18th were in fact citizenship and immigration Canada employees,” Sun News Network spokesman Luc Lavoie said.

The incident came to light after a series of e-mail exchanges involving bureaucrats at citizenship and immigration were released in response to a request made by The Canadian Press under federal Access to Information laws.

Those e-mails showed that subbing in bureaucrats for “new Canadians” was the idea of Tracie Leblanc, an acting senior communications adviser for citizenship and immigration Canada’s Toronto office.

At 3:24 p.m. before the broadcast the next morning, Leblanc e-mailed colleagues to say “10 candidates confirmed,” the number of candidates that had been requested by Dayna Gourley, the Sun News Network producer for the show.

But by the next morning, Leblanc apparently had to scramble when seven of those “confirmed candidates” backed out.

As she wrote in an e-mail to her colleagues on the afternoon of Oct. 19, she had six bureaucrats show up at the Sun News Network studio in Toronto who were presented to the show hosts and viewers as new Canadians.

That inference was spurred because of an e-mail released by the department from Sun News Network producer Gourley to a bureaucrat, in which Gourley wrote, “Let’s fake the oath.” But Gourley, a broadcast veteran who has worked at Global and Citytv and left Sun News Network in November for CBC, seems to have used that phrase in the context of a discussion with bureaucrats about the logistics of broadcasting the ceremony.

Attempts to reach Gourley Thursday were unsuccessful.

But the e-mail exchange released to Canadian Press makes it clear that Gourley’s phrase, contained in an e-mail sent Oct. 12, could not have had anything to do with the fake new Canadians who would eventually show up Oct. 19 because up until the afternoon of Oct. 18, the bureaucrats were boasting in other e-mail exchanges that they had found 10 real new Canadians to participate in the ceremony.

On Oct. 17, Leblanc wrote that she had eight “new Canadians” confirmed for the ceremony and was working hard to find two more.

Then, at 3:24 p.m. on Oct. 18 - hours before the Sun News Network broadcast that would take place at 10 a.m. the next day - Leblanc wrote to her colleagues that she had “10 confirmed candidates” and provided what appear to be brief biographies of the candidates. The names and biographies were blacked out by government censors.

At 6:12 p.m. on Oct. 18, another bureaucrat, Raylene Baker, writes her colleagues to say “a couple of hours ago” they had found the final ninth and 10th new Canadian for the ceremony.

But in an e-mail to her colleagues hours after the broadcast, Leblanc admits that seven of the “confirmed candidates” failed to show up so she rounded up six bureaucrats to fill in as fake new Canadians.

Leblanc was praised by her superiors for quickly find the fake “new Canadians.”

“Tracie saved the day on this one!” her supervisor, Ian Darragh, wrote in an e-mail.

Lavoie said that the on-air hosts of the broadcast, Alex Pierson and Pat Bolland, had no idea that six of the 10 were, in fact, bureaucrats and not new Canadians.

“We have nothing to hide,” said Lavoie. “It looks like Minister Kenney and our viewers were deceived by a well-meaning bureaucrat who made a poor decision.”